Bruno Frisoni’s retreat in the bustling port city of Tangier is as eclectic and inventively chic as his creations for Roger Vivier.

Through a decade and more of high-concept designer shoes—towering constructions larded with details and hardware—Bruno Frisoni has conceived fashion for the foot (and bags, and bijoux) as whimsical and as thoughtfully stylish as he is. In his role at Roger Vivier, where Frisoni has been creative director since 2002, the accessories maestro has reinvented the refined but imaginative taste of the designer credited with bringing the stiletto heel to high fashion and encasing the feet of the most stylish women of the mid–twentieth century in creations of elaborate fantasy.

“I’m always very spontaneous,” says Frisoni of his design process. At Vivier, “I have tried to bring back this very sophisticated Parisian idea of shoe-making—to make ‘chic’ alive! What was important was not to bring a shoe line back, but to make it instead a maison—a fashion house rather than just an accessory line.”

To this end, Frisoni’s ready-to-wear collections are presented in evocative environments that reflect Roger Vivier’s own taste for innovative decorating. Vivier’s much-photographed apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, for instance, with its suave and prophetic mix of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiques, contemporary art, and Asian and African sculpture, was radically new and influential in the fifties and sixties. Frisoni has channeled its excitingly eclectic flavor in the Vivier stores, where similar pieces are juxtaposed with monumental bronze and lacquer consoles and vortex-shaped lamps and chandeliers, created by his partner, Hervé Van der Straeten. The spirit also inspires the high-style environments that Frisoni and Van der Straeten have conjured in their own homes: a loftlike Parisian apartment, an eighteenth-century house in Frisoni’s native Burgundy, and—most dramatically—a residence in the medina of Tangier, the windblown Moroccan port city.

Van der Straeten had succumbed to Tangier’s hidden charms in the late 1990s, when his friend Lisa Lovatt-Smith asked him to join her and create the illustrations for a book she was writing on Morocco’s fabled interiors. For Frisoni, however, his first impressions were unpromising. Accustomed to the more picturesque delights of ancient Marrakech and Fez, he was confronted by a sprawling place of “traffic jams and a lot of dust.” But he loved the house of their host, the garrulous decorator Yves Taralon, constructed like the prow of an ocean liner and set in the side of a sloping cliff with plunging views to the Spanish coastline some 20 miles across the water. Frisoni also warmed to the city’s madcap and fun-loving denizens, and the pale ribbon of empty beach stretching to the pretty whitewashed seaside village of Asilah down the coast. “It was not exactly a touristic town,” he remembers—and this, ultimately, was its appeal.

Other friends had acquired a house in the medina that had once served as Barbara Hutton’s closet—as it stood adjacent to Sidi Hosni, the palace in which she disported herself in Catherine the Great’s emeralds, and entertained the froth of visiting and resident café society. Frisoni had recently found a ruined house on the Amalfi Coast, but the deal had just fallen through, and he was persuaded to at least take a look at a place for sale near the Hutton wardrobe. It was built to the classic Arabic pattern, turned claustrophobically in on itself with a series of long, narrow rooms set around small inner courtyards. But Frisoni could see that, with some deft manipulation of floor heights, stately spaces could be created, and that the redundant secondary staircase—which effectively blocked views in both directions—could be done away with.

The house also seemed to resolve Frisoni’s quest for a manageable project whose construction would be relatively easy to supervise long-distance, and with a garden that could be nothing more than terra-cotta pots of oleander and palm.

Nevertheless, the house sat empty for some time—Frisoni was consumed by the relaunch of Vivier, and the couple was focusing on the restoration of the Burgundy house and its gardens. Navigating Tangier’s planning permissions was at times Kafkaesque. “It’s really a city of extremes,” says Van der Straeten. “Everything is easy, everything is complicated—or even impossible.”

But in the interim the two were compiling scrapbooks of possible inspirations for the interior architecture and decorations. Irving Penn’s amber-hued mid-century photographs for Vogue of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn; Delacroix’s delicate studies of Moorish rooms with their elaborate tile work; and Matisse’s views of Tangier’s Grand Socco painted from a room at the Grand Hôtel Villa de France were all starting points for color schemes.

Frisoni also gleaned inspiration—not to mention a stockpile of furnishings—from his travels. The dining room’s hanging lamps, for instance, were created from Damascene brass beggars’ bowls and suspended from horse bridles found in Mexico’s Pátzcuaro; “everything is made of accidents,” as he says.

Meanwhile, the exuberant Casa de Pilatos, in Seville, with its stalactite woodwork ceilings and complex tiled floors, was a decorating touchstone, and the city palaces of Damascus and Aleppo in Syria (visited well before internal war ripped the country apart) provided another mother lode of ideas.

Van der Straeten suggested updating the marble floor treatment in the Alhambra palace in Granada—created when white marble was so precious that every piece would be used in a complex jigsaw puzzle, with the bigger slabs in the center of the rooms. “I was really afraid of the idea of shiny white marble,” Frisoni remembers, worried that it would suggest a bank or a butcher’s shop, but the marble was honed to create a timeworn patina, with the smaller elements on the first floor, and the largest panels used for the piano nobile. “In the end it was fantastic,” says Frisoni, “because this really gives the house the sensation that it’s always been there.”

The local Rue de Hollande, with its crowded stores filled with gimcrack seventies furniture and over-the-top ormolu, yielded a cabinet of astonishing chic, its doors made from the panels of an Asian lacquered screen. But Frisoni admits that the most fun is to commission textiles and handicrafts from the fonduk—a sort of medieval enclosed market square nearby where skilled weavers ply their wares. Meanwhile, artisans were discovered in Fez who came to create the elaborate mashrabiya fretted woodwork, and the plasterwork for a jewel box of a room that brings the flavor of nineteenth-century Morocco to the house’s cool seventies, James Bond vibe.

Frisoni has also absorbed lessons from the homes of some of the other taste-making French expatriates in the city, including couturier Jean-Louis Scherrer—with whom he worked at the outset of his life in fashion—whose Moroccan courtyard house on the harbor has a “very grand white–and–gold salon atmosphere,” while Générale Beaufre’s villa was “English-looking, colonial-with-a-twist,” with its pale-pink and turquoise rooms, and a certain expat’s “perfect shoe box,” with whitewashed walls and austere furnishings, strikes him as “just like her; elegant and quiet.”

In an ever-expanding city where clumsy construction continues at a relentless pace, the Frisoni and Van der Straeten house seems untouched by the frenzied activity outside the medina’s walls. “Even though Tangier is a very modern and developed city, the medina really feels like timeless Morocco,” says Van der Straeten, “like a village. Two hours from Paris you’re transported immediately to another period.” There are communal ovens where people bring their bread to be baked, and the steep, broad steps are often flanked by little booths where tailors sit cross-legged, and their apprentices plait skeins of brilliantly colored silk thread into the braids that are used to trim caftans and djellabas.

And through initiatives like the TanJazz music festival, and the work of the dynamic artist Yto Barrada, who has turned the 1930s Cinéma Rif into a lively meeting place for locals and expatriates alike, “you discover the face of modern Morocco,” says Van der Straeten.

The spirit of the place, meanwhile, threads subtly through Frisoni’s collections—it may be as literal as the decoration of knotted buttons that flourish on a traditional caftan, or a burnoose’s golden-cord trim, or something as abstract as a sequined embroidery that mimics a sunset sky over the bay, or the mix of pale yellow with dark green noted in the dress of an old Berber gentleman crossing the Petit Socco. “Morocco is something else now for me,” says Frisoni. “It’s not the shock of the new or the newly discovered. But when you go that often to a country, it starts to be a part of you—it’s like an infusion, and it could come back anytime.”